Hi there. I am required to do a backup and restore of a site collection that has grown to +- 400GB (DB size). What we want to do is take the data of the current site, back it up to a new web app/site collection, and gradually delete data from the current live system that exists in the restored collection.
The issue is that we cannot do a DB backup and restore, since SP does not allow 2 content db’s with the same id’s on the same farm.
Using the Backup-SPSite and Restore-SPSite commands takes forever to run, and do these without affecting the live environments, we would need to do it over a weekend. Unfortunately according to our calculations, a weekend just does not have enough hours…
Anyone with some info or options that we can use to achieve this? Your help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for your reply Sami.
I tried you first suggestion, picked up issues with IDs and new web app did not pick up any content in restored DB.
Seems like restoring to a separate farm is the only solution. Not sure if that will work in my situation, since the DEV and PROD is all I have to work with. Will see what I can do
Instead of Backup-Restore command , you can take backup at SQL Level i.e. take a backup of DB in SQL Management Studio with help of DBA and then restore it with a different name.
When creating the new web application , you just need to give the name of the restored database and it will pick all the content.
For 2 content dbs with the same ID , I think you need to copy them to a separate SharePoint Form and create a new web application there (i.e. it will assign it a new GUID)
